2022 - What I did today

I haven't managed to get into the garden much in the past week. On a background of having done far less over the past 6 weeks or so than I had planned. Sometimes that's the way life goes...

Anyway, yesterday I finally got round to putting my greenhouse tomatoes (and solitary aubergine) into large containers. Far, far too late and some varieties already have quite a few tomatoes on them. However, I'm really hoping that moving them to bigger containers will encourage a bit more growth and get me a few more tomatoes than I have coming right now.

I also had a walk round the rest of the garden. I should be able to harvest more broad beans today. Not a lot but hopefully enough for a full portion for me later. I snaffled the few ripe raspberries that hadn't been eaten by the birds. My raspberries canes are collapsed all over the place as I never got to tying them up, so the are easy pickings for the birds!

I'm surprised how some things are thriving despite my neglect. My winter squash plants are looking pretty good, and the supermarket peas I sowed for peashoots are now giving lots of pods so I may leave them to give me a small crop of marrowfat peas to dry.

One lot of onions is looking great. That's the one planted into the heavy clay soil and then mulched with decent compost a few weeks later. The onions I planted directly into my first B&Q compost all look stunted and sad in comparison. To be honest, I blame that compost (in which all my seeds were sown, and seedlings were potted on) for a lot of my garden's failure to progress. Everything was so stunted by it early on, and the difference that the new compost I bulk-bought from Wickes is astonishing. Unfortunately, some things just couldn't catch up from that poor early start and my beans and peas in particular are pretty disastrous. I think it's not too late to direct sow a few more beans and peas in the hope they do better, so I'll try to get those in today. If nothing else, I can hope for enough growth that the runner beans might come back stronger for a second year, so probably worth doing.

All in all, it's not where I hoped it would be at this point, but that's okay. It's a work in progress, and I hope it will continue to slowly improve and give me bigger and better crops next year!